4 Things You Should Know Before Researching a Voice of the Customer Solution

Customer-centricity is not an overused mantra – it’s a strategy that delivers real and tangible benefits for organizations. Amazon, Apple, Adobe and many others are examples of the success of being intensely focused on the customer, and delivering a flawless experience that is simple and intuitive. This success starts with understanding your customers.

Confirming your customers’ needs, wants, perceptions, preferences and expectations are the building blocks to adopting a customer-centric strategy. One of the best ways to do this is to collect customer feedback using a digital Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution. This type of solution collects the feedback of your customers on all your digital channels, from your website to your mobile apps, and provides a range of comprehensive reporting tools to help you analyze the data.

But before jumping in and selecting a digital VoC vendor, here are a few things you should know:

1. Get your business objectives sorted out

Information is powerful, but it is also political. One of the greatest obstacles to obtaining insights from VoC is the objectivity of the results. The query “What questions were used and who wrote them?” often becomes an unnecessary distraction with custom questionnaire design, where everyone includes their own two cents.

With the proliferation of self-serve survey tools available today, everyone in the company seems to have results to a survey that argues for their preferred agenda. To make sure you collect objective results, you need to come to an agreement and clearly define what you want to achieve with your VoC program from the outset to make sure everyone is aligned when it comes to questionnaire design. Is it to increase conversion or evaluate your marketing effectiveness, or improve customer satisfaction? By deciding this beforehand, you can compare vendors based on how they plan to tackle and meet your business objectives.

2. Comment cards or surveys?

There are several ways to engage your visitors for feedback through your digital channels. From online surveys to comment cards, each of these approaches all provide the means to measure and manage the customer experience in their own way.

For example, with a website survey, you can use a random engagement methodology to collect a robust representative sample of how all your visitors feel about the customer experience, which is perfect for making strategic decisions. Comment Cards, on the other hand, leverage a passive persistent engagement methodology that is more ideal for providing an outlet for your customers to vent their frustrations. While the data from Comment Cards does not provide you with a representative sample of your visitors, it is an ideal approach for customer relationship and support purposes.

As you look at what is best for your business, keep an open mind when discussing with vendors. This way, they can demonstrate different options that will work for your unique situation.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. After agreeing to take a couple of minutes out of your busy day to share feedback on your website experience, the last thing you want is for your feedback experience to be clumsy, and lead you to drop out in frustration. This is especially important when you start considering how your visitors’ experience can differ based on the device they use. Whether it is on desktop, tablet, mobile or in-app, visitors are more likely to leave feedback when the experience is engaging.

Also, if the survey or comment card isn’t adapted to the right device, it can impact the results you get with visitors dropping out and not wanting to provide feedback. Therefore, when selecting a VoC solution, ensure that they offer a collection interface where (a) all question types are completely responsive and (b) it is optimized for touch screens.

4. Staff

Many companies tend to ask the right questions to vendors, but can often overlook asking some of the most important questions internally. For example, who is going to manage the project? Who is going to do the analysis? By understanding who will do what internally, you can select a VoC vendor that is going to complement your needs and support you were you might have gaps.

Today, the customer experience is mission critical today and can’t be ignored. As you start to make the first steps towards selecting a VoC solution check out this buyer’s kit that can guide you through the process.

Duff Anderson is a visionary in Voice of the Customer research with over 20 years’ experience. As SVP and Co-founder at iperceptions, Duff is responsible for providing expert advice to organizations on how to gain a competitive advantage across the customer lifecycle and improve the customer experience.

4 Things You Should Know Before Researching a Voice of the Customer Solution

Customer-centricity is not an overused mantra – it’s a strategy that delivers real and tangible benefits for organizations. Amazon, Apple, Adobe and many others are examples of the success of being intensely focused on the customer, and delivering a flawless experience that is simple and intuitive. This success starts with understanding your customers.

Confirming your customers’ needs, wants, perceptions, preferences and expectations are the building blocks to adopting a customer-centric strategy. One of the best ways to do this is to collect customer feedback using a digital Voice of the Customer (VoC) solution. This type of solution collects the feedback of your customers on all your digital channels, from your website to your mobile apps, and provides a range of comprehensive reporting tools to help you analyze the data.

But before jumping in and selecting a digital VoC vendor, here are a few things you should know:

1. Get your business objectives sorted out

Information is powerful, but it is also political. One of the greatest obstacles to obtaining insights from VoC is the objectivity of the results. The query “What questions were used and who wrote them?” often becomes an unnecessary distraction with custom questionnaire design, where everyone includes their own two cents.

With the proliferation of self-serve survey tools available today, everyone in the company seems to have results to a survey that argues for their preferred agenda. To make sure you collect objective results, you need to come to an agreement and clearly define what you want to achieve with your VoC program from the outset to make sure everyone is aligned when it comes to questionnaire design. Is it to increase conversion or evaluate your marketing effectiveness, or improve customer satisfaction? By deciding this beforehand, you can compare vendors based on how they plan to tackle and meet your business objectives.

2. Comment cards or surveys?

There are several ways to engage your visitors for feedback through your digital channels. From online surveys to comment cards, each of these approaches all provide the means to measure and manage the customer experience in their own way.

For example, with a website survey, you can use a random engagement methodology to collect a robust representative sample of how all your visitors feel about the customer experience, which is perfect for making strategic decisions. Comment Cards, on the other hand, leverage a passive persistent engagement methodology that is more ideal for providing an outlet for your customers to vent their frustrations. While the data from Comment Cards does not provide you with a representative sample of your visitors, it is an ideal approach for customer relationship and support purposes.

As you look at what is best for your business, keep an open mind when discussing with vendors. This way, they can demonstrate different options that will work for your unique situation.

Put yourself in your visitors’ shoes. After agreeing to take a couple of minutes out of your busy day to share feedback on your website experience, the last thing you want is for your feedback experience to be clumsy, and lead you to drop out in frustration. This is especially important when you start considering how your visitors’ experience can differ based on the device they use. Whether it is on desktop, tablet, mobile or in-app, visitors are more likely to leave feedback when the experience is engaging.

Also, if the survey or comment card isn’t adapted to the right device, it can impact the results you get with visitors dropping out and not wanting to provide feedback. Therefore, when selecting a VoC solution, ensure that they offer a collection interface where (a) all question types are completely responsive and (b) it is optimized for touch screens.

4. Staff

Many companies tend to ask the right questions to vendors, but can often overlook asking some of the most important questions internally. For example, who is going to manage the project? Who is going to do the analysis? By understanding who will do what internally, you can select a VoC vendor that is going to complement your needs and support you were you might have gaps.

Today, the customer experience is mission critical today and can’t be ignored. As you start to make the first steps towards selecting a VoC solution check out this buyer’s kit that can guide you through the process.

Duff Anderson is a visionary in Voice of the Customer research with over 20 years’ experience. As SVP and Co-founder at iperceptions, Duff is responsible for providing expert advice to organizations on how to gain a competitive advantage across the customer lifecycle and improve the customer experience.

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